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Canva Review

By Timothy Shim . Last Updated on January 2, 2019

What is Canva?

Canva is yet another freemium online graphics tool thatâ€™s extremely simple to use and offers a mountain load of templates that can help you out. Itâ€™s supposed to be a quick and easy way to create visuals and help those unskilled in the magic of graphic design.

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Getting to Know Canva

The general flow of Canva is much the same as anything in its category online nowadays. You sign up (either with Google+ or an email address) and then just follow the breadcrumbs. Canva will prompt you to choose what type of graphic youâ€™re trying to create, then be suggesting various template visuals for you.

Canva is very easy to use, even easier than Microsoft Paint.

Once youâ€™ve chosen the layout and template youâ€™d like, then comes the customization. Everything is drag and drop, and text can be edited much like text boxes in any other graphic design software.Â Iâ€™ll admit, it is very easy to use.

Is Canva free?

Here is where a slight differentiator comes in between free and paying users.

The 1,000,000 images are for paid accounts. Free accounts are more limited.

For those who are using the free version, Canva has slightly more limited templates available for you to choose from, and limit your collaborative team to 10 members. Even more importantly, it doesnâ€™t offer you any images at all. Any images you want to use will have to be your own or licensed for you to use. It will sell you images at US$1 a piece though.

Those who opt for a paid business-class account will get a 30-member team account, plus access to what Canva claims is a database of 300,000 images. It can also help you resize your designs. Other highlights include the acceptance of custom fonts, color palettes and the ability to save templates.

My experience with Canva

Since Canva offers an option to design brochures, I got curious and tried that out. I was interested because printing brochures often require higher resolution files for them to turn out nicely after print. It was good to note that once I had tested the brochure template, the system offers an option to download the file as a printable PDF.

I checked with a designer friend of mine and he agreed that the brochure was simplistic (he is, after all, a designer) but definitely usable in print. This is a critical point to note for those thinking of using Canva as a business tool.

Aside from downloading copies of your finished design, you can also share them directly on Twitter or Facebook. You can also email people from within the tool to invite them for collaboration in the design of whatever youâ€™re working on.

Conclusion

A few people I checked with and spoke to of Canva gave me quite an interesting perspective. One of them is a teacher and she mentioned that itâ€™s great to use to create simple visuals to help teach the kids with. My designer friend, on the other hand, had nothing great to say about it except for one thing â€“ that it did not consume the massive resources that Photoshop does.

On my part, for most of my professional career, Iâ€™ve been either a writer or editor and have quite a bit of experience with layouts and graphics, even if not producing them myself. Because of this, I quickly grew bored of running around in tiny circles with Canva.

Although itâ€™s immensely easy to use, I found that for the type of output Iâ€™d require in print, it proved way too simplistic. On the other hand, itâ€™s great for creating instant visuals, so long as you donâ€™t mind that youâ€™ll be sharing templates with probably thousands of other people.

I feel that this is something that would be valuable from a small business or personal standpoint, probably the former more than the latter.

Canva at a glance

Canva is great to create simple visuals. Often, it helps those unskilled in the magic of graphic design.

PROS

Freemium subscription model

Very simple to use

Integrated with stock photo image bank

CONS

Limited functionality

PRICING

About Timothy Shim

Timothy Shim is a writer, editor, and tech geek. Starting his career in the field of Information Technology, he rapidly found his way into print and has since worked with International, regional and domestic media titles including ComputerWorld, PC.com, Business Today, and The Asian Banker. His expertise lies in the field of technology from both consumer as well as enterprise points of view.

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